Cases Quote by Stephen Briggs

“year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English…

— Charles Dickens

“this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to…

— Charles Dickens

“History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of…

— A.E. Samaan

I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied…

— John le Carre

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

— Tony Judt

“I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of…

— Sarah Vowell

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

— Hilary Mantel

“earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to…

— Charles Dickens

My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.

— Patrick deWitt

The mystery of history is an insoluble problem.

— Henry Ward Beecher

We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller…

— Alice Morse Earle

“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they…

— Gary Goldhammer